探索寻找外星人

Jill Tarter: People have been wondering about whether there’s life elsewhere for millennia, and what we used to do is ask the priests and the philosophers what we should believe.

吉尔．塔特：外星是否存在生命？这个问题困扰了人类千百年。而我们通常所做的就是向牧师和哲学家求助。

You’re listening to Jill Tarter, astronomer and director of the Center for SETI Research. SETI stands for Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence.

今天节目组采访了SETI研究中心总监、天文学家吉尔．塔特。SETI全名Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence，即著名的“搜索地外文明计划”。

Jill Tarter: What was so cool is that in the middle of the 20th century, we got some new tools –radio telescopes – that would allow us to do an experiment to try and answer the question scientifically.

吉尔．塔特：20世纪中期射电望远镜的问世是振奋人心的，它使人类得以找到解决谜题的关键。

Tarter explained that the organization started its search for extraterrestrial life in the 1960’s, using an 85-foot telescope to monitor radio signals from two stars.

塔特向记者说明了上世纪60年代研究中心如何开展外星生命搜索的。他们架设了一座直径85英尺的天文望远镜来检测两颗恒星之间的无线电信号。

Jill Tarter: Today we’re looking at many stars at once, with hundreds of millions of spectral channels. Our tools for searching are getting better, and faster, exponentially.

吉尔．塔特：如今我们可以通过上百万光谱通道同时观测许多星体。我们的搜索仪器越来越精进，更新换代的速度也成倍上升。

2010 will mark SETI’s 50 -year anniversary. Tarter said that, as far as scientists know, no SETI device has ever received a signal from extraterrestrial intelligence. But Tarter believes that SETI can change life here on Earth.

2010年是人类搜索地外文明50周年。塔特表示，就科学家所知，SETI使用的仪器尚未接受过外星生命的信号。但他相信SETI计划能改变人类的生活。

Jill Tarter: Getting people actively involved in doing SETI gives us an opportunity to get them to change their perspective, to actually look at themselves within a vast cosmos. And that has the effect of trivializing the differences among people, and that’s got to be good.

吉尔．塔特：通过积极参与地外文明搜索计划，人类得以从广阔的宇宙视角来观察自身，因此不同人群之间的差异将会缩小，这是件好事